Page 82 of This Haunted Heart

“Pa?” I said gently, and the creaking on the steps ceased.

The shade hovered there, and the house went cold, so cold the windows frosted over, and my breath fogged up. Rynn pressed against me, shivering.

“Don’t you remember, Pa?” I told him. “Mother’s not here. She’s at her sister’s, and she’s expecting you. You’re not going to leave her waiting, are you?”

The shadows darkened to a pitch-black I couldn’t see through, and the temperature dropped further. I hugged Rynn to my chest against the bitter bite of the cold.

“Loch?” Rynn gasped.

A familiar fear gripped my heart, crippling me. I clung to her as the darkness moved to cover us. Rynn buried her head in my waistcoat, and I hid my eyes in her hair. The shadows swallowing us up were absolute.

I felt like a boy again, small and powerless, shrouded in a night that was full of all the same strange sounds I’d come to fear the most. I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t feel anything but the cold and the icy grip of Rynn’s fingers digging into me.

I was drowning in the darkness, in the scritch-scratching against the wood, the eerie creaks and groans of creatures I couldn’t see.

But then Rynn began to sing. The melodious tune grew louder, drowning out those horrid sounds. It wasn’t a song like anything I’d hear in a music hall. It wasn’t sultry or beguiling. It wasn’t haunting like the ballads my nightingale performed in my dreams. It was nothing like the songs she’d sung whenI was sick.

This was a silly made-up song little Rynn used to sing just for fun. The joy of it cut straight through the darkness. The urge to laugh warmed my soul, chasing off the brutal cold.

“Pa,” I said, and the darkness faded from an inky black to a light blue like the sky when the sun was rising. His shade loomed there, a foggy presence I stared directly at, daring him to come for me. “You were a shit father.”

“Damn right he was,” Rynn added at my side, and I pushed her behind me. Then a breathy, nervous chortle escaped her before she went back to humming her silly song.

The shade hovered, growing darker, casting a shadow down the staircase that wrapped around the banister. He charged but stopped just in front of me.

I thought I’d be frightened still, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t find even a sliver of fear in me for this loathsome man. I could sense the panic and terror in him, and I was no longer a small boy and no stranger to ghosts. I’d outgrown him. He’d looked like a big strong monster when I was a child, but to my adult eyes, my father was nothing more than a sad, pathetic man, too scared of shadows to face them himself. He’d turned Rynn and me into bait for the spirits that haunted him, and I could think of nothing more pitiful.

He was weak. Too desperate and wretched to hold my fear now.

“But I was wrong before,” I choked, remembering the words I’d used twenty years ago to trick him out into the marsh, away from seeing eyes. Rynn laced her fingers through mine, and I found strength in her touch. “I’m sorry, Father. I was wrong when I told you Mother went wandering in the mire. She’s not lost. She’s not here at all.”

He wasn’t going to hurt us anymore. He couldn’t. Not without me hurting him worse. He was more afraid of us than we were of him. He was nothing but a shade now. No different than the shadows that once haunted him, as helpless as wrathful ghosts always were and just as lost.

The steps creaked, the floorboards rumbled, and the shadows melted away. The doors flew open, and an eerie wind whistled inside, bringing in the light. The room warmed once more, thawing the windows.

“Is it over?” Rynn asked me.

I pulled out my lighter and struck the flint. The small flame heated my hand.

“Not just yet,” I said, and the turn of my lips felt wild and wolfish.

I followed Rynn into the parlor. She settled in the center of the room, taking in the spartan space. Spiders spun cobwebs between the bar and the wall.

“I fell in love with you in this room,” she said, and the confession brought me up short.

“That so?” I was still emotional from the conversation with Father. Her words made my throat burn. I didn’t resist the tears when they came. Rynn had certainly witnessed me crying often enough that there was no shame in it now.

She pointed at the corner of the room nearest the archway. “My knees hurt and my hands were cramping after scrubbing the floors in the hall. I was hiding in here from more chores, but the baron caught me. He started in with his hollering. You were over there.”

I remembered the moment she described, and I could picture a smaller, scrawnier, twelve-year-old me hiding near the bar—afraid, but not for myself. I was scared he’d boxher ears again or worse. I couldn’t stand it when he hit her. Nothing made me feel more useless—or angrier. I hated it most when no one else did anything. The other adults would pretend it hadn’t happened at all.

“You broke a glass for me,” she said, and her lips twisted just so with the sweetest hint of a smile. “I knew you’d done it on purpose. I saw you knock it off the bar. He turned on you instead, and I was sure of it then. I knew I loved you. I knew I always would . . . Do you believe me, Loch? Do you believe I love you?”

“I do,” I said urgently. I couldn’t form words to express what that meant to me. I could barely swallow for the catch in my throat. Rynn was a runner, but when the one man she’d always feared the absolute most had charged at us just now, she hadn’t left me.

She hadn’t run.

Rynn gave me my space then. She found an abandoned rocking chair in the parlor, and she threw it against the wall, repeatedly. She giggled gleefully while she shattered it. I made torches out of the broken pieces, wrapping the ends in curtain fabric while Rynn went looking for more things she could smash.

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